Contents

Info for new users

For all users...

After you login for the first time, you should click my preferences at the top and at least enter your real name and email address. Do not be tempted to change your password here; the normal password system has been routed through the university's NetID system so changing your password in EEBedia will have no effect (or at least not a positive effect).

Please do not edit the main page. The main page is special because it is the first thing everyone sees when they enter the EEBedia. It would be confusing if it were always changing, so please add your 2 cents elsewhere. The same goes for the navigation bar; yes, it is possible to change it, but please resist the temptation. You are welcome to send me suggestions, however, if you think something should be added or subtracted to the main page.

Visit How to add to EEBedia (always available under the Help link on the navigation bar to your left) to learn how to get started creating and editing articles.

For graduate students...

If you want your research to show up in the EEB Spotlight area of the main page, create a short intro with a single image and a title like this "Dissertation Research: Your Name". See Dissertation Research: Jon Richmond for an example. By starting your title with "Dissertation Research:", it makes it easy to find all of these research synopses by typing "Dissertation Research" into the search tool.

At the end of this page, put in a "More..." link to a page with a more extensive description of your research, and a few more photos (including one of yourself if possible). See Jon's page for an example (i.e. click on his More... link).

Starting a new page

There are two easy ways to create a brand new page:

Type the title of your new page in the search box, then press go. The search will fail, but you will be given the option of creating a new page with that title

Edit an existing page, putting in a link to the non-existant new page. When you save the page you edited, the link will show up in red, meaning it does not yet exist. Click the new link and you will be given the option to create the page.

Avoid the temptation to edit the main page (say for the purpose of adding a link to your new page). If your page represents a news item or an upcoming event, you might want to make a link to it on the Current events page. This page can be found by clicking the Current events link on the navigation bar to your left, and its contents are dumped into the Main Page. Just remember to date your entry (formatted like the other news items) and keep your announcement short. You can link to a page with more information, for example by placing wikitext like the following in your advertisement: [[MyPage|More...]], where MyPage is the title of your more extensive page.

Text

Just type text in the window that appears upon clicking the edit tab of any existing page. You can use the toolbar at the top of the window to learn how to italicize or bold words. Likewise, creating a new section can be done by surrounding the title with equals signs. Two equals signs flanking a title produce a subheading. For example, the heading of this subsection looks like this: ==Title==.

Much more information about organizing and formatting wiki pages is available at the Wikitext site.

Hyperlinks

To add a hyperlink to a page external to EEBedia, just type in the URL (including the initial http://): For example, here is a link to the EEB home page: http://hydrodictyon.eeb.uconn.edu/ that is created by simply adding the text http://hydrodictyon.eeb.uconn.edu/ to the sentence.

Most of the time, you will not want long URLs to clutter up your page. It is easy to create a short hyperlink by enclosing the URL in square brackets and, after a space, typing in the name you wish to use: For example, here is a link to EEB that is done like this: [http://hydrodictyon.eeb.uconn.edu/ EEB].

Footnotes and citations

To add a footnote or citation to a page, insert the text of the footnote at the spot where you want the footnote symbol to appear, surrounded by a <ref> tag. For example, here is a a reference to a work familiar to biologists[1]. Here is what I inserted at this point in the document:

...work familiar to biologists<ref>Darwin, C. R. 1859. ''Darwin, C. R. 1859. ''On the origin
of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for
life.'' London: John Murray.</ref>. At this point...

Note that the body of the footnote does not appear here. Instead, it appears at the bottom bottom of this page in a "References cited" section, at a point where I inserted the following tag:

Uploading files (e.g. images)

Slime mold at Goodwin Conservation Center

Pediastrum duplex.

You can upload an image file at Special:Upload. Please refrain from uploading an image that is excessively large. If you click the image of Pediastrum duplex at right, you are shown its actual size, which is about 60 KB. This is a reasonable size. The image of slime mold fruiting bodies at left is about as large as an image on EEBedia should be (150 KB). Images larger than this must be reduced in size to fit on a typical computer screen, so such files take up more space on the server than is needed.

Below is the wiki text that was used to create the two images shown here. Note that including the keyword thumb causes the photo to be shown as a thumbnail (reduced size) image. The larger image can be obtained by clicking on the thumbnail. You can use the keywords left, right, or center to position the image horizontally on the page. Finally, the last entry in the image tag is the caption text. See the extended image syntax page for more information about inserting images in to wiki pages.